Figures / Vailien
Vailien
“veil, belonging to”
vail “veil” + -ien “belonging to”
Vailien (“veil, belonging to”) is a 8-star constellation of The Other Sky, spanning 24° of the northern sky. Its brightest star is Anaien, magnitude 3.64.
The story
The Fennen hold that Vailien was a lampwright who kept a light burning for a ship that had already come home, and was let go, which was the worse sentence. It is a figure of the summer, and its setting is the older marker for the end of that season. Anaien, the amber eye, is the wound; the remaining 7 stars are counted from the ground up. Those who keep the old year still leave a cup out when it rises.
Where to look
- Right ascension
- 19.23 h
- Declination
- +11.46°
- Angular span
- 23.9°
- Stars in the figure
- 8
- Best season
- summer (northern hemisphere)
- Circumpolar
- nowhere — it rises and sets at every inhabited latitude
Its stars
| Letter | Name | Mag | Type | Distance | Temp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiv | Anaien“mother, belonging to” | 3.64 | K9 III | 62 pc | 3,763 K |
| bhor | Ossis“bone, little” | 3.70 | M2 III | 61 pc | 3,438 K |
| ciel | Haelaera“breath-open-sky” | 3.76 | B8 I | 1.29 kpc | 13,170 K |
| dor | Jossethalune“luck-longing, place of” | 4.02 | M3 III | 151 pc | 3,247 K |
| enn | Orbisemmeth“circling-lantern, of the” | 4.11 | F4 III | 80 pc | 6,853 K |
| fael | KS 1580 | 4.24 | K3 I | 834 pc | 4,682 K |
| gyre | KS 1611 | 4.28 | G2 III | 71 pc | 5,818 K |
| hesp | KS 1643 | 4.31 | M0 I | 1.45 kpc | 3,649 K |
How this was made
Vailien was not designed. It was grown outward from Anaien, the brightest star in this part of the sky that had not already been claimed by another figure, absorbing near neighbours until it ran out of them — which is, near enough, how the constellations of the real sky came about. Its name is Ilmenic, an invented agglutinative language: every name on this site decomposes into morphemes and can be translated.